Page:Mr. Wu (IA mrwumilnlouisejo00milniala).pdf/99

 And he had done her well too, by Jove! He was always kind to her. He let her have her own way absolutely when her way did not cross his, and their ways too rarely met (in any soul-sense) to cross often. And he was generous to her. He began that way, and, it is no little to the credit of so busy and business-bound a man, he had always kept it up. They had been married twenty-five years, and he bought flowers for her still. And jewelry he gave her constantly. No woman, unless she was the wife of a rich noble or a millionaire, had more good jewelry.

Mr. Gregory had given his wife some good jewelry for a wedding present. But the handsomest gifts she had received then had been sent her by an acquaintance he had never seen: a Chinese undergrad who had left Oxford the year before—"damned rich Chink," as Robert Gregory expressed it, when he did not put it even more chastely, "a Rothschild of a nigger."

The Chinese gift, a bracelet of emeralds and turquoise and jacinths and pearls, still was the most beautiful and the most valuable jewel Basil Gregory's mother had, and she wore it on every occasion that justified such splendor. And Hilda, watching its green fire and blue softness on their mother's fine white arm, could but wonder hungrily whether it would become ultimately the possession of herself or of Basil's wife.

"It is the most beautiful jewel I have ever seen," John Bradley said when he first saw it.

"Yes, isn't it?" its owner acquiesced; "but when I have it on, I always feel as if I were wearing a bit of Revelation."

"More like a bit of the Koran," the priest had reassured her with an odd smile.

She was greatly puzzled. She had always supposed